Improve Healthcare Management via Electronic Health Record System

Dear Colleagues,

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are a key aspect of modern healthcare. They can make patients’ data available for different parties within the treatment chain almost in real time and thus improve the continuation of care. EHRs can also improve patients’ safety if various safety checks are included in the EHR system. In sophisticated EHR systems, it is possible to supervise the quality of care. Structural recordings in EHRs will help to gather data regarding patients and treatment results, thus enabling the data-driven management of healthcare units. This has the potential to improve both the efficacy and effectiveness of the treatment. However, EHR systems also have their caveats. The systems are often complex and expensive. The optimal use of EHRs requires the extensive education of the staff. Furthermore, a dependency on EHRs will cause new types of safety issues, because their availability has to be over 99.9% in practice, and any unplanned disruptions will cause major risks in terms of patient safety. The opportunity for multiple actors to access the EHR system creates also issues regarding the confidentiality of data and the privacy of patients, and sometimes, quite complex solutions are needed to secure patients’ rights to privacy. However, EHRs are here to stay. It is likely that in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) will be a part of EHR systems, helping professionals to select those at-risk patients for appropriate treatment and guide others to enable better outcomes.

Prof. Dr. Lasse Lehtonen
Guest Editor

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